what happens next in the debate over the fiscal cliff. caller: i think with the current state of our economy, if the government is not doing their job and are taking their vacation and stuff, why don't they start at minimum wage? that would wrestle them up. get rid of their pensions and put them on 401k's. it is about time we started to take care of the people again. host: barbara from manchester, new jersey. caller: you will never get the gop in power to cooperate. that is not their goal. their goal is to make president obama a failure, no matter what it does to this country. thank you. host: lots of different points of view. joshua gordon. guest: the main issue is when you look at how spending programs are growing more quickly than the economy. we need to look at how we are going to pay for that. we are not going to pay for it with a major reform. this fiscal cliff thing is a short-term issue. we are trying to recover from this financial crisis. the economy is slowly doing better but still has not come back to pre-crisis levels. do we w